Hands On (excerpt)

“There has to be a better way for this motherfucker to happen. Nothing is as powerful as fear, Jack. Not even Maiden.”
We’ve been on the job now for over a year. Crack’s been dying for three. Some kind of motor deterioration or something to do with his nervous system. He lights his smoke and swallows his serum,
“I’ve been taking triple the required minimum. If I could get more, I’d use it. It tastes like shit, but it chases that white shit like crazy.”

It’s really crank, but everyone calls him Crack because Crack’s a lot funnier. Crank has longer staying power, and it kills Crack’s pain. He’s saving money for experimental surgery somewhere in Europe. We’re five miles off the Mississippi Delta. Two more weeks on this fucking rig and we get released for three weeks. Crack jumps on a plane for Austria, come to think of it, and I head back to Texas. My wife has her own troubles, a jaw full of TMJ and a busted wrist. It’s been one thing working on this shitpile but it’s been decent being away from the house during all that.

We have one daughter, a so-called miracle baby because my wife was told she was sterile by two different doctors. We raise her and she runs off at seventeen. Now she moves in and out of the house. She’s been married four times and hasn’t had one single kid. I don’t know if it’s her luck or ours. But it makes her living with us a lot easier. She’ll be twenty-nine in August. Miracle my ass.

But Crack’s problems outweigh any of ours. Especially Goate’s bullshit. He’s trying to tell us that it’s harder to stay rich than to be poor. He’ll rip off some bullshit about how some asshole stole the Mercedes symbol from the hood of his car, how his wife can’t keep honest help around her shop and a bunch of other droll and sickening shit we have to wade through long enough to get our checks. We stand there and empathize with the cocksucker. It never occurs to him that if he dropped dead none of us would blink.

Crack snorts what has to be his sixteenth rail of the afternoon. I’ve never seen him off the shit and I never want to. He assures me that he screams in pain without it. Crack has a funny voice due to the blow and the vaccine. Not cartoon funny or strange funny, but damned-near-dead funny. It creeps me out, to be plain rude about it.

We’ve been drilling here for weeks on end. It doesn’t make me feel one way or the other about how much the industry of my employ fucks Mother Nature in the ass. The way I see it she’s got it coming. I don’t know why that point of view is so offensive to people. Only difference is I face it directly, I don’t get to hide behind a regular life. Ask Crack about Mother Nature.